Tuesday, October 26, 2010

There's a pumpkin carving contest this week, and the pumpkins are free, so I figured I'd give pumpkin sculpting a whirl. This is the result of about 3 hours with an exacto knife and a medium sized loop tool.

For a first attempt, I'm pleased. I may add some wire stitches to the forehead laceration if I can acquire them by Thursday morning.

Subtractive sculpting is hard, especially when you're used to pushing clay and you're working on a round object with only about two inches of workable material before it becomes a dark, seeded void, but it's still quite fun.

Monday, October 11, 2010

I'm doing Special Makeup Effects and assisting with Production Design on a student werewolf film.

Devils Chariot was kind enough to provide one of his excellent coyote skull castings, which I painted up yesterday with watered down Raw Umber craft paint. This is just for set dressing, but I'm pretty excited about it.

Then I molded and cast the actor's teeth who's playing the werewolf.

I was able to use this "Amazing Mold Putty" from Michaels to make the negative of the actor's teeth, then pour in plaster. It doen't admit to it on the box, but the putty is definitely a 2-part silicone. The dentures themselves are also be of rather unorthodox materials.

I sculpted the dentures over the actor's tooth casting using flexible ("Bake & Bend") Sculpey for the gums and translucent Sculpey for the teeth. The flex clay keeps the gums from breaking, as regular Sculpey is somewhat fragile, especially when it's this thin. They don't look like much here, but once you pop 'em in the mouth and back away a few feet, they're pretty cool.

I also did some hand-laid hair on the wolfman's forehead. Crepe hair and spirit gum. The director didn't want a full transformation, so we kept it at forehead hair and teeth. I'm not totally satisfied with the result, but it's better than my previous attempts.

I color-corrected this shot to see what it would look like in the final film when they do the day for night conversion. It seems to have gotten darker when I uploaded it. These shots are without teeth.

Lastly, there was a bullet wound. I didn't get a picture of the one I did on set, but here's the test application I did on my arm:
For the shoot, of course, there was lots of blood dribbling out of it, but you get the idea. It's just Mehron 3D Gel with some black cheapo makeup in the center for depth.

None of this is anything spectcular, but it certainly was a good experience.